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Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
What Is Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT?
Raiser's Edge NXT is a smart, cloud fundraising solution built to help nonprofits achieve sustainable growth. It's a total solution that includes all the tools needed to be successful on one platform and one simple subscription price. This includes data enrichment services, event management, and social and email marketing tools, online donations, flexible reporting and actionable analytics. Raiser's Edge NXT pulls together your processes and people to move your entire mission forward.
Who Uses Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT?
We serve the entire social good community, which includes nonprofits, foundations, companies, education institutions, healthcare organizations, and the individual change agents who support them.
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Reviews of Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT
We do all our Donation processing with Raiser's Edge. All data entry, constituent 'touches' & repor
Comments: Database for all donations - information is kept reliable, complete (can be used to store a lot of data/facts) and accessible for reports
Pros:
Data entry is easy and reports are dependable. Versatility in the type of information that can be stored in each constituent record.
Cons:
the software programmers I know say the set up is very 'old school.' I use batches a lot in RE - and the setting up of each is not as intuitive as some software programs out there.
A Game Changer for Prospect Managers
Comments: I think the RE NXT interface is incredibly intuitive. It helps new team members get on the ground faster with learning how to search records and find the information that they need. That said, a strong background in the database view is helpful to any member of your team, whether they are on the road or not. I would strongly suggest having teams trained formally on both systems.
Pros:
What I love about RE NXT is that it helps to visualize graphs, such as donor patterns and key financial data, automatically. You no longer have to have endless queries and exports and dashboards to access the data you want the most. This helps facilitate staff meeting discussions, and also keeps all team members informed on the fly. Secondly, the prospect profiles for managers. Gone are the days of exporting travel profiles in plain text. Now a PM can login from the road to see all the details they need in a useful manner -- and what's even better? They can change how the data is displayed so that it is personalized to them. It is clean, well constructed, and yet also flexible enough to be able to dig deeper with a couple of clicks. And if they need to find a new person to visit in their area, the map tools are perfect. Highly recommended for offices with lots of traveling teammates.
Cons:
As with both versions of RE, you only get out what you put into it. You need to make sure you have the right policies and procedures in place, for example, to make sure that certain fields in actions are required. You'll also need to work with your team to make sure they understand the updated language from the database view to the NXT view. For example, proposals and opportunities are the same thing. This is a bit of a challenge in offices where the NXT vs. database team may not interact that much and will be speaking slightly different languages about this software. It is not a deal-breaker, just a trainable moment.
No customer support - aggressive re-subscription
Comments: RE has a lot of capabilities that are not user-friendly with little-to-no support from them, and very aggressive sales endeavors. Essentially, we did not have good experience with them at all and glad we switched to a service that is user-friendly and very responsive. We were very surprised by their strong-arm tactics to re-subscribe, although they were unsuccessful, thanks to the Better Business Bureau, at which time RE could not produce any contract to which they had claimed we were bound.
Pros:
A lot of functionality for large nonprofits, yet with little to no customer support.
Cons:
Very aggressive sales endeavors and dare I say devious re-subscription processes. They tried to re-subscribe us at a very high price quoting a timeline when we could decide to not re-subscribe. We tried to unsubscribe, but they said we were bound by a contract. We had been using RE for more than a decade, with no consideration. They insisted we missed the timeline to unsubscribe and demanded a very expensive fee for the following period. Ultimately, we reported them to the Better Business Bureau and they could not produce a signed contract from our agency, or even a template from them. We had a back-and-forth with RE via the BBB, at which time they stopped contacting us realizing they had no basis for their demands.
Valuable and versatile database
Comments: I'm speaking to RE7, i.e. the database view specifically, which many nonprofits use exclusively but those who purchase the NXT bundle also have access to the full database view as well. I've been using RE7 for 12 years and overall I love it, especially in combination with the NXT web view.
Pros:
There is so much you can do with Raiser's Edge, it's a robust and powerful tool. It works "out of the box" without need for programming or customization per se (other than settings and configuration etc.) so you don't need to be a coder to set up and use. I particularly love queries to pull together lists of donors who meet certain criteria, which can then be used for mailing lists, reports, exports, etc. The acknowledgement letters are incredibly valuable, allowing variable data and personalized language, e.g. when a gift is designated to a particular program we pull in a paragraph about that program without our gift entry staff having to do any manual or extra work.
Cons:
Can be a bit clunky, and not always intuitive (NXT web view is a huge improvement in those areas). The reports aren't pretty (again NXT is astronomically better there) and sometimes there isn't a report that will work for our needs so I have to set up with queries and exports. There is almost always a way to do what I need to do, but I sometimes have to go through some complicated digital acrobatics to get there.
Great Product, but Could be Overkill for Most Nonprofits
Comments: It's doubtful to me, especially after having worked with a few smaller nonprofits which have used Raisers Edge, that even the heaviest users in this arena are using even 50% of the product's out of the box functionality. So while I love the product, and especially love it because it integrates seamlessly with Financial Edge for the accounting reporting, smaller nonprofits are probably better served with something just as user-friendly but much cheaper for donations/events/membership management, like Avectra's Net Forum.
Pros:
Blackbaud's Raisers Edge is great software for donations management, including special events and memberships. It's very easy to use, and very easy to get information from, whether through any of the many canned reports, or through queries and exports. Support is extra, but well worth the cost, at least in the initial years after set-up.
Cons:
The cost - upwards for just the donations management - is considerable. And things like the Special Events module and Membership and Tributes and Memorials modules are not included in the base package. Like most other software, a lot of thought needs to happen when setting Raisers Edge up. But seriously for every con that I could list, the customer support that comes extra with the annual maintenance, if purchases, offsets the con with quick answers and fixes, so that even the most complicated thing in RE is easily addressed with a quick phone call to support.
